1961 Berlin Crisis
 US tanks (foreground) face Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie, on October 27–28, 1961
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US Tanks facing Soviet Tanks in Berlin October 27, 1961
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The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (4 June – 9 November 1961) was the last major politico-military European incident of the Cold War about the occupational status of the German capital city, Berlin, and of post–World War II Germany. The USSR provoked the Berlin Crisis with an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Western armed forces from West Berlin—culminating in the city's de facto partition with the East German erection of the Berlin Wall.
The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—the last to be attended by the Communist Party of China—was held in Moscow during the crisis.
After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, some of those living in the newly acquired areas of the Eastern Bloc aspired to independence and wanted the Soviets to leave. Between 1945 and 1950, over 15 million people emigrated from Soviet-occupied Eastern European countries to the West. Taking advantage of this route, the number of Eastern Europeans applying for political asylum in West Germany was 197,000 in 1950, 165,000 in 1951, 182,000 in 1952 and 331,000 in 1953.
By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to controlling national movement, restricting emigration, was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany. Up until 1953, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones could be easily crossed in most places. Consequently, the Inner German border between the two German states was closed, and a barbed-wire fence erected. In 1955, the Soviets passed a law transferring control over civilian access in Berlin to East Germany, which officially abdicated them for direct responsibility of matters therein, while passing control to a government not recognized in the US-allied West. When large numbers of East Germans then defected under the guise of "visits", the new East German state essentially eliminated all travel between the west and east in 1956.
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